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Bug 607025 - notifications should have a maximum width
notifications should have a maximum width
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 606755
Product: gnome-shell
Classification: Core
Component: general
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: gnome-shell-maint
gnome-shell-maint
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2010-01-14 22:11 UTC by William Jon McCann
Modified: 2010-01-18 14:40 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description William Jon McCann 2010-01-14 22:11:49 UTC
The notifications should have a maximum width for a few reasons.

 * It is harder to scan a large area of the screen.
 * If the message is too long it takes a long time to read it and it may disappear before then.
 * The "start" position for reading will vary between notifications
 * Generally one reads the entire thing to determine if it should be acted upon and that takes too long with a long message.
 * We want the message to be consumed in little more than a glance if possible
 * Currently it can even be wider than the screen

On very small screens it may make sense to consume the entire width of the screen.  However, on large screens this makes very little sense.  So, we probably don't want to use a percentage of the width to constrain the size.  Probably a certain number of 'em' units would be better.

I guess we have something like the following:
[App icon] [Summary] [Message]
           [actions...]

I'm thinking that maybe actions as buttons should be on a separate line.  And they should be infrequently used.  Perhaps we should also limit the number of them.

The icon should already be a constrained width.  So this leaves the summary and message.  Some messages may have one or the other or both.  So we should probably not try to constrain them separately but rather as a single entity.  For the exact width I think we're going to have to experiment a bit but maybe something like:
 Use the full width of the screen up to a maximum of 140em.

If they exceed this they should be ellipsized.  More of the message can be displayed in the details view.
Comment 1 Dan Winship 2010-01-14 23:06:51 UTC
bug 606755 implements max-width (of screen_width/2, picked arbitrarily), but it makes long notifications be line-wrapped and then pop-out on mouseover, rather than being ellipsized.

do you want them to *not* pop out?

also, the current tray height is not enough to have both a line of text AND buttons underneath.
Comment 2 Dan Winship 2010-01-18 14:40:06 UTC
duping this to the other long-notifications bug. please respond there

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 606755 ***